Michelangelo's Seizure

In Michelangelo's Seizure, Steve Gehrke seizes the lives of several classic and contemporary painters--from Caravaggio and Magritte to Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock--to demonstrate how these artists transformed physical, psychological, and political suffering into art. Mirroring the brushstrokes in long, metaphor-laden sentences, Gehrke moves freely through the canvas, into and out of the artists' lives, into the public realm, into history, to capture the way the creative mind can transform even the most violent surroundings--a prison cell, a battlefield, a madhouse--into a masterpiece.''with the witchcraft hushed inside his veins, onto the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew, crumpled, fierce, with two dead bugs crushed into the paint, like that bit of terror, he would think, sealed inside of everything He makes.'' --From the title poem ''Michelangelo's Seizure''